


Ymira

by tanarill



Series: Lifthrasr [4]
Category: Norse Religion & Lore
Genre: Asgard, Bees, Cats, Cheating, Fiber Arts, Helheimr | Hel (Realm), Jötunheimr | Jotunheim, Love, Muspelhiem, Mysteries, Names, Niflheimr | Niflheim, Other, Pet Names, Possession, References to Norse Religion & Lore, Seer, Shapeshifting, Strawberries, Swords, The Netherlands, Theft, Vanaheimr | Vanaheim, Wisdom, Wolves, charity - Freeform, knowledge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-04 00:14:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17887859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tanarill/pseuds/tanarill
Summary: Ymira was not her mother's first daughter; but she was her father's first child.





	Ymira

**Author's Note:**

> A character study on Ymira (the one with the sword).

Ymira’s parents loved each other and they loved her; even if she hadn’t known it implicitly, from the way they acted, she’d have known from what Tree had taught her. This was because what Tree had taught her was not future-sight, but past-sight. Tree, and maybe Mimr, were the only ones who could beat her at it. Grandpa Wednesday probably had the skill, but he’d never seen the point and couldn’t get out of it the same things Tree and Mimr and Ymira did.

Grandpa Wednesday had, once, forced the knowledge of the beginning out of a dead seeress, probably before Aunt Hel (who was her half-sister, not her aunt at all) took over the realms of the dead in Niflheim. But it was one thing to know what had happened and quite another to have seen it herself. That was, in fact, the very first thing Tree had taught her to see, long before she could talk. Other children would probably have been frightened, but Ymira’s family was as much giant as it was Aesr, and so she watched the fires of Musplheim and the ice of Niflheim create and then went to bed comforted at night.

Ymira was also unusual in that she was as much human as she was not. That, she knew, was an unplanned side effect of her parents having decided to live outside of Asgard and Muspelheim. Their logic there was good, as Father would never have been quite welcome in Muspelheim or Jotunheim and no one in Asgard would ever really trust Dad again, if they ever had. The only other options were Niflheim with Aunt Hel, Vanaheim, which had the same issue as Asgard, and Midgard. They lived in the Netherlands, and Ymira rode Sleipnr to school in Amsterdam. Grandpa Wednesday had been worried about that, because Sleipnr was not known for tolerating children. Then again, his half-sister had never been the child in question.

She got good grades, but did not excel. She _could_ have excelled easily, but Tree had explained to her after her first day of kindergarten that using past-sight was akin to cheating. Any merit she won ought to be won under her own power. (This didn’t mean that she didn’t know how to cheat, even without the past-sight. With a Dad like Loki, it was impossible to avoid knowing. She just _didn’t_.)

Other things about Ymira, in no particular order:

She talked to bees. Generally she did this while in the apiary. She got stung anyway.

She liked sunset better than sunrise. If both Sol and Mani were in the sky at the same time, the colliding scattered light would allow her to glimpse, for just a moment, her nephews Skoll and Hati. She did not fear wolves.

She liked to sew and weave. Dad disapproved, but he’d been caught in a net of his own devising. Father knew how, but couldn’t do it well. She’d wanted Tree to teach her, but Tree had told her to go learn from Frigg, who up till then she’d always thought of as her _other_ grandmother. She was not very good at it, regardless.

She liked strawberries, wild by preference.

She talked to Jormungandr. What very few people realized was that he talked back, although his responses took enough time to teach her patience.

She learned to call Dad “Daddy” from Aunt Hel, who did it to annoy him. _She_ did it because (she’d discovered) being ingratiatingly cute meant that no one noticed her filching the silverware. She generally melted it down and donated it to various charities afterward. After all, she was her Father’s daughter too.

She had a scar on her left palm, given to her by Fenrir when her parents took her to Lyngvi to meet him. Dad had been furious until she’d shown him the sword she’d taken out of his mouth. The scar was a debt to be repaid. The sword she named Eirioda.

She could shapeshift, to a point. Father couldn’t do it at all and Dad could do it so well that she (and Sleipnr) existed, so on the whole it balanced. She could only change into things that weighed the same as she did, which at this age meant smallish animals mostly. On occasion she could make small, superficial changes to her appearance.

She talked to cats.

Aside from these things, there were two great mysteries in Ymira’s life. One was her naming, the other her place. She didn’t remember her naming, but she knew beyond a doubt that she could not have been the one to name herself; she knew herself well enough to know the difference between herself and someone riding her body when she watched the past. She also knew that, in some odd way, she _had_ named herself, because she knew herself well enough to know herself riding her body. If asked, Tree would just smile and look smug.

The other, tangentially related issue was that no one, not Odin, not Mimr, not the Norns, not even Tree, could tell what kind of goddess she was. They looked at her and saw, variously, possibilities, blackness, chaos, and what kind of goddess she wasn’t. This would have worried her but for the fact that Tree said that it was quite likely that, when she got full siblings, all of them would be the same way. Tree was not a goddess and didn’t let it bother her, so Ymira just shrugged and went on with life.

When she was six, Loki decided that she was old enough to handle having a baby in the house, and promptly got pregnant.

**Author's Note:**

> This week, I sent out more resumes and did a phone interview. I don't think I did very well. Does anyone have phone-interviewing-tips?
> 
> On a semi-related note, does anyone know how to program in R? Or free lessons? I found some good ones but they cost money to go beyond the most basic basics, and a lot of people want me to know how to code even though I'm a microbiologist. I don't mind learning a new skill, but I can't just read an instruction manual and learn without practice problems!


End file.
